 Ahoy Hoy! Okay, so after our fun little April Fool's joke on the 31st of March, I have decided to take this opportunity to switch my schedule around a little bit, and we're going to do a You're Wrong About video today. And from now on, I'm going to try it anyway. We're going to do You're Wrong About videos every Thursday. We'll do the dank memes on every other Tuesday, and well, I'll still have to figure out something for a fourth video, but yeah, at least I only have to do that once a week. Today, we're going to talk about a few misconceptions that people often seem to talk about when they talk about posting to the SCP Wiki. Primarily two real issues, how the green light process works, and how the SCP Wiki's content is curated. Let's talk a little bit about how You're Wrong about posting to the SCP Wiki. So first of all, the biggest issue I have, at least in the recent years, or essentially the recent years, since this is sort of a new process, they have on the SCP Wiki realized that they don't have enough people to handle the critique process, and the critique process is something that is seriously involved, requires a lot of creative energy, a lot of time, effort, and really, all they have on the SCP Wiki are volunteers. Not a single person is getting paid for the work that they're doing. And since they're not getting paid for the work that they're doing, sometimes the work gets done, and sometimes it doesn't get done. There's one particular critiquer called Zen, and she does an amazing job of keeping up with critique on the SCP Wiki, but she's one person. And when there are dozens upon dozens of drafts posted in a, well, I'm not gonna say dozens and dozens in a day, but a couple dozen a day is, in the worst case scenarios, not entirely unlikely, eventually run out of steam, energy, and creative, creative energy, and time to do it. So they've instituted a new policy called the Greenlight Policy. However, because of the way the SCP Wiki works, they tell you, always seek critique on your posts before you post them. But that's not a necessary requirement. That is a very strong suggestion. So you don't have to seek critique. You don't have to do anything other than just post to the Wiki. And this is important because a lot of people run into the Greenlight Process, or they look on the forums and they see the Greenlight Process, and it does talk about how if you're going to get a green light, you have to get two, I think it's two established authors or critiquers to say that your idea is worth writing, and then you can put a pitch up in the, that's for the ideas and drafts forum. And the guides actually telling you straight out to look to IRC and the ideas critique forum in order to get your ideas refined before you start working on your first draft. First of all, this is not the best advice because everybody's process is different. This is assuming your process requires you to go from an ideas stage to a draft stage and then to a finished product stage. Some people don't have a problem with fun ideas. They just come to their, I mean, so and first and momentum is a thing in writing for a lot of writers. You get started on a thing and you get rolling and you get it done. So a lot of the ideas that go through the critiques forum get posted as ideas even though they already have a finished draft because they have to get their ideas approved before they can do the finished draft, but you don't have to do any of that. And primarily another piece of that advice is saying you have to use the IRC chat rooms for critique or at least making it seem that way. You don't have to do that either. You can post to the wiki without getting any advice, but if you do want to get advice, you can get it from anywhere you'd like. If you've got a writing teacher, if you've got, if you want to go to me, you want to go to my Patreon, you want to go to my Patreon and say, hey, I'll pay you $20 a month to give critique on my articles. Or if you want to, there's a numerous places you can get help. The important part, of course, is that once you get help, you listen to that help. As someone who has helped people with their writing on a lot of occasions, one thing I've noticed is that people have a bad habit of not actually listening to the critique you give. They have an idea in their head and it's got to be that way. Or they listen to what you're saying, but they really weren't asking you for, like, they were asking permission, basically. Their anxiety was telling them that their idea wasn't good enough. And they don't really want you to tell them what's wrong with it because that just reinforces the anxiety. They want you to tell them that it's fine and it's great and that you should keep doing this. And so the critique process, and this is more like what we're talking about here, the critique process on the SCP Wiki is broken. And it's always been broken because there's always going to be more drafts than there are people willing to review those drafts. And they have to continuously select it down to smaller and smaller and smaller groups, but it's always going to keep growing exponentially as the site becomes more and more popular. And the problem is, is that staff and people they trust to do these critiques are a very small group and they would like to stay that way. They can't have a group of two dozen critiqueers all being members of staff because being a member of staff has other implications, other powers involved. So it's a whole big old mess. But the truth of the matter is, if you want to post the SCP Wiki, just get advice until you think the work works. And if you post it and it's no good, listen to the people who tell you what the problems are, and then fix those problems. Secondly, we're going to move on from critique to the other half of today's video, which is the SCP Wiki is not a top-down curated collection of stories. There's this idea that the SCP Wiki writers, especially new writers want to have where they think that it's a top-down curated experience. And that the reason that their article didn't make it was because they just weren't in with the moderators or they weren't in with the staff like there's a lot of I'm not in with staff but I can still post an article in the Wiki in my last SCP. It was like a couple months ago and now it was like plus 200. My average for tales, which I write more of those than anything else is like plus 70. I don't know, maybe it's a little lower than that. It feels like it's a little bit. No, it was plus 70. So like you don't have to be in with staff and you don't have to be an established writer like myself in order to get success on the SCP Wiki and just write well and success will follow you. But the thing is the SCP Wiki is a bottom-up curated experience because there is curation in the idea of the voting process. Understanding how the voting process can be bent to your favor, finding tricks and tips for how they get that to work can change a mediocre rating to a above average rating or a really good rating. And sometimes that snowballs into an amazing rating. None of that changes the fact that if your work isn't good in the first place, at least not good enough, that's what I should say. The work isn't good enough in the first place. It's not going to survive on the Wiki. Just straight up not going to survive. The problem isn't that some select oligarchic group at the top of the food pyramid says, looks down on you and goes, that's no good. It's that everybody else does. Like you can get five downvotes from established authors and 150 upvotes from completely new people who have never written for the Wiki. And guess what? Your article is going to be very highly rated and very well regarded, essentially. But that's not wholly true because rating doesn't fully equate to quality. The thing about rating is that it's just a sort of a baseline that kind of gives you a demonstration, like an idea of how quality something is. But it doesn't itself say that this is good. Like I believe the third most upvoted article on the site, I could be wrong. No, it is. Is the procrastination rock, which I talked about in the last top 10 video where I was talking about communism will wins articles. Now the procrastination rock is okay. It's inoffensive. It's sort of funny. It gives you a chuckle when you realize what's going on. But it's not some magnum opus. It's not some amazing art. Same thing with SCP 173. 173 is not amazing. It doesn't do anything that the SCP Wiki doesn't do better literally a thousand times, else wise. But there's still the highest rated articles on the site. And I say first and second, which is SCP 173 and the procrastination rock because I think number two actually is a quality article. Number two on the ratings list is 2521, which is the picture SCP, which I think is a very high quality article. But it's not a high quality article just because it's highly rated. Just as the other ones are not necessarily high quality articles because they're highly rated, but also they're not low quality just because they're highly rated. We can't look at it and go, well, you know, all the popular stuff is bad. That's elitism. And it implies the top down curated experience which the SCP Wiki just doesn't have. A lot of people want to think that way. Even established authors like to think that they have some sort of control or power over how the SCP Wiki's content gets made. And there are people who are highly influential. I like to think that I have been influential in the development of style and content on the SCP Wiki just as people like DJ Cactus have and the variety of other people. People who have written for the Wiki long enough and with enough articles that are highly either highly rated or highly regarded, which is not the same thing, that have driven or even just cannons that have driven people's expectations of what SCP Wiki articles and tales should be. And when I talk about, and I've said this before and I know it pisses off a lot of established authors because when you say, as I do, the quality standards of the SCP Wiki are not very high. People who write for the Wiki and who aspire to become Wiki writers, look at that as though I'm looking down on them or something like that. Or like everyone I say something like, oh, I don't have any great articles. All I have is something that's plus 600. And everyone goes, you spoiled fucking brat. The problem, I think, is that people don't understand the SCP Wiki's just glorified fan fiction. It's good. I think that's good. The idea of how the top down or I should say the bottom up curated experience means that anyone, literally anyone can find success there. And your first article is going to be crappy, even if it survives. Generally, there's some amazing writers who come in and just right off the bat managed to make something work. But generally, your first article, even when it survives, is going to be pretty crappy. You improve along the way. If I look at my very first article to my very last article that I've just written, the quality is in some of the ones in between, which are better or worse, depending. The quality has improved, my writing ability has improved along the way. It's not that you, if you're a writer for the Wiki, are a bad writer. What I'm saying, and I hope this comes through, is that just because you've got an article up doesn't make you a success. And just because I have 116, 117 articles up doesn't make me a success. Just because I'm a YouTube channel with nearly 50,000 subscribers doesn't mean I'm a success. There's always room to grow. And I think the SAP Wiki provides an amazing venue for that. And maybe it's not the end game for a lot of people. A lot of people who write for the SAP Wiki are just hobbyists. They're not planning on turning it into a career. But if you do want to learn how to write, the SAP Wiki is a great place to do it. But as long as you can accept that what you write is not always going to be amazing, and it still could survive and be very highly rated. That's it. That's all I wanted to say. Anyway, thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, scroll down, hit the subscribe button, then hit the notification bell next to that, so you'll be notified when I upload new videos. Now, I'm going to plug my Patreon, and I know right now in the world things are going haywire. Unemployment is shooting up, and I just yesterday I got my Patreon back, or numbers in, and I went down by like almost $80, I think it was. Which was expected. Advertising revenue is probably going to have to hopefully advertising revenue goes up as the Patreon dollars go down, because it's been the other way around sometimes. I understand that, but if you can pledge, if you're fine, if you're doing alright, and you can pledge, please pledge. Or you can pledge at the level of Manuel Moltorp here, who is another one of my $40 backers, and I appreciate that more than I can say. If you pledge at $30 or $40, you get your name read out, and all the access to all the things that everyone else gets. Thank you for letting me know that I'm not alone out here, and just for the record, neither are you. I'll see you all again on Tuesday, with a dank memes from site 19 video.